It’s a heavy burden to be in charge. Or, at least it should be. I assume anyone who wants to be in charge is either a dangerous megalomaniac or forced into the role to prevent a bad person from seizing power.
I also wonder if the people in those roles even know which of the two types they are. It’s an easy lie, to tell yourself and to believe yourself, that your need to rule is altruistic. It seems to me that very few terrible people realize that they’re terrible.
Eventually, “I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once as I ever was” turns into “I can’t do that anymore.” It’s hard to know when that happens, though, unless you continue trying.
I’ve always enjoyed the genre of story where the old gunslinger, the old boxer, the old dog, etc., gets up for one last fight and goes down in a blaze of glory. If the old character wins decisively, then he/she isn’t at the edge, yet. There’s more story left to be told. If they lose decisively, then he or she is way beyond the edge and it’s more of a sad and tragic ending (and it’s probably a moment in someone else’s journey.) For the story to work, you need to dance around on that line.
Pro Wrestling handles these stories better than any other medium. Who among us doesn’t remember Shawn Michaels, with tears in his eyes, taking out Ric Flair and ending his career… then sobbing over him after. Give them both an Academy Award.
Ryan Brown’s vibrating cell phone wakes him up with over fifty notifications, all of them asking if he is okay, and nearly all relaying that they saw a story on the news about someone with his name jumping from the Brooklyn Bridge late the previous night.
Ryan is quite shaken, though, and far from “okay.” He distinctly remembers jumping and has no idea how or why he is back in his apartment this morning.
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You sometimes hear people say that it would be fun to attend your own funeral, just to see who shows up, how people react, etc. I guess this story is kind of an adjacent idea.
About 20 years ago, someone who shared my name and age died in a relatively well-publicized car accident just outside of my hometown. Quite a few people reached out both to me and also to my parents. All of that produced a strange mix of emotions, assuring people that I was fine and being touched that they reached out. You don’t always know how many people care about you.
A couple of months ago, I saw a story on the news about a woman who was planning to jump off a bridge, only to be talked back by Jon Bon Jovi. That real story seems almost as incredible as my fake one. I don’t know if there’s a celebrity I’d most want to see in my darkest moment, but it would be hard to top Bon Jovi under those circumstances.
If you ever have self-harming thoughts, please reach out and talk to someone.
I debated over whether to flip “goodbye” and “gift.” I decided I liked it better this way, as it puts the motives and emotions of the person leaving more into focus for me. The person leaving is the one who defined the parting as a gift. But when you flip the two words, the focus moves onto the recipient. The recipient is the one who defines the characterization of the goodbye.
Occasionally I start talking myself into the notion that – hardships and all – pre-Industrial man was better off and more fulfilled. Then I think about how they lived in wooden houses and defeated the darkness and cold with candles, torches, and fireplaces, and I reconsider.
How much more common an occurrence were house fires five hundred years ago? Was the danger such that they were less common because teaching about fire safety was paramount? (These types of questions are how you lose an afternoon in a Google rabbit hole.)
You can google “the Great Fire of ____” (fill in the blank with your city) and usually pull something up. Assuming that you are not a believer in Tartarian Empire conspiracy, you might conclude that devastating fires were far more common in the not too distant past, precisely because if open fire and wooden structures. If you are a believer in the Tartarian Empire conspiracy, then you believe Great Fires were common in the 19th and 20th centuries because of a meticulous effort to erase our history. I suppose open flames and wooden buildings made that effort easier.
After waking up, Brian immediately notices the breakfast scents wafting through his apartment and into his bedroom. In addition to taking in the aroma of bacon and eggs, he hears his pot of drip coffee make a gurgling sound as it finishes brewing.
The trouble is… Brian lives alone.
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Are there any circumstances wherein someone quietly breaking into your apartment to feed you is a good thing in the long run? On the other hand… breakfast food is delicious.
“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself”
Is this a loop one can get trapped in? I think it’s sort of an easy thing to not notice “egoism” when it feels justified by something reasonable. If your mind is focused on yourself, because of a problem you have, it feels rational to focus on yourself in an effort to solve that problem.
But what if the effort to solve the problem is perpetuating it? The most content people I know think about themselves the least (or so it seems from outside of their brains.)
They old double whammy. But do people still write notes? Are there situations wherein hand-writing bad news is still the practiced etiquette? To be honest, I never really did any of that anyway, even when it was probably more fashionable to do so. I was apparently so good at breaking up with people (when I was in the dating pool) that I was once asked by an ex-girlfriend who had been on the receiving end of that from me for advice on how to do it, but I always delivered my bad news face-to-face.
Anyway… this story idea might be extremely dated. “Dear John” letters are part of the antiquated past. I am pretty sure that young people just text their breakups these days. I’ll have to pull myself out of the 1900s and put thought into updating my story for modern times. Can you sprain a finger swiping a touchscreen phone to open it? Is that as poetic as a paper cut?
Kaitlyn has never cared much for Halloween, but she dutifully leads her son – dressed as “the Hulk” this year – from door to door so that he can collect candy and see his friends in their costumes. As they pass by an eerie-looking scarecrow, set out in front of an expensively decorated yard, she decides that she has had enough candy and creepiness for one night and tells the boy that they are going home.
Watching them set off down the street in the direction of their house, the scarecrow steps down onto the sidewalk and begins to follow.
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When I was a kid, people decorated for Christmas. You’d usually have a couple of houses in the neighborhood that really went all out, but most of it was pretty modest. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation was funny in part because of how over the top the Griswold family decorations were. What was once insane now seems not far from normal. Almost nobody decorated for Halloween.
Now I have neighbors with fake cemeteries in their front yards, giant inflatable ghosts and spiders in and around their house, and I occasionally run into yards that are just a little bit too realistic with their ghoulish decor.
In the event that you walk past one of those “that’s too realistic” houses while you and your offspring are questing for candy, keep your head on a swivel.
Sometimes two people catch feelings for each other, and despite the fact that they both know it will end badly, it happens anyway. It’s not always two people, though. Sometimes a person catches feelings for a puppy he or she cannot afford to care for. Sometimes you decide to move to a big expensive city before you figure out how you’re going to afford the move.
It’s a good idea to avoid situations wherein your brain tells your heart that “this won’t end well” because the brain is almost always right in the long run and eventually both brain and heart will have to deal with the fallout of letting the heart take the lead.
Dusty Writes 